I
can’t tell you how thrilled I am to have been invited to speak to you tonight.
I spent some of the best years of my life living and organizing here in
Gainesville from 1969 to 1973 before I moved back to the New York area to work
with Redstockings on Feminist Revolution. I even fell in love here, but that’s another story. Anyway, I want to
thank the Womens Studies Student Association and University of Florida/Sante Fe
Community College Campus NOW for this wonderful invitation and Gainesville
Women’s Liberation for making the suggestion and providing the connection that
made it possible.

~~~

We often hear that those who
do not learn from history are bound to repeat its mistakes. That’s so true! But
in this Women’s History Month, I want to talk a little about what was done
right, from the experience—the history—which I lived through and helped make.

When I
was a student in the early 1960s at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, I
suppose I was pretty much like you. But the rules were quite different then for
women. We were not allowed to wear pants to class unless it was below zero.
Women were required to live in the campus dorms until they were 23 years old.
The men weren’t. Women students had to be in the dorm by ten on weeknights and
midnight on weekends. The men had no such hours. I remember several times being
really pissed when speakers would come to campus and the women would have to go
back to the dorms after the speech while the male students would get to go hang
out and talk with the speaker. Instead of demanding what we really wanted—an
end to all these rules for women—we politely asked the Dean of Students to
extend our hours a little. We had a lot to learn.

After
graduation I was offered a real plum job as a reporter at the United Press
International Des Moines bureau—the first woman to hold that job there, I
think. My beat was to be the Iowa State legislature. A few weeks before the
session started, another reporter—a man with even less knowledge and writing
ability than I had—was hired and he was given my beat and I was assigned to the
rewrite desk. I was made the alternate legislative reporter and the first time
I showed up at the Capitol Building’s press parking lot, the attendant wouldn’t
let me park because he didn’t believe that I was really a reporter because I
was female. When I finally got inside, I found the legislators didn’t want to
talk to a woman reporter. All this was done blatantly, too, because there was
no feminist movement to stop it. In disgust and desperation I went off to join
the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, which was waging and winning a great
struggle against racism and segregation. I figured if I couldn’t write about
important events, then I’d just go help make history myself. I had no idea at
the time that that decision would entirely change the direction of my life.

I want
to make it very clear that we didn’t start the Women’s Liberation Movement back
in the 1960s because we hated men per se, but because we hated being oppressed.
Men were often the ones doing the oppressing and we wanted them to stop it. We
wanted them to treat us with respect and to move over and allow us to stand
shoulder to shoulder in our own place, partially so that men and women could
really love each other—both sexually and as comrades—as equals. We believed
that our liberation was in most men’s long-term interest as well as in our own,
even though it meant a serious struggle to make them give up their privileged
position. We knew, for example, that if men took equal responsibility for their
children, they would lose some free time and have to do more work, but they
would gain something much more precious: a close and good relationship with
their family. Some men see that more clearly than others and want to support
feminism. We have to teach them how and why to give that support, just as we
often need to teach them to make love in a satisfying way or how to really
clean the bathroom. Also, working men are our potential allies in the struggle
against our capitalist oppressors.

It is
very difficult to find the right words to talk about the most successful years
of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s because the
terms and concepts that everybody had at least a passing familiarity with have
either been co-opted, distorted, buried or even turned on their heads. I hope
if I say “revolution,” for example, you’ll know that I’m not talking about the
takeover by Gingrich and the forces of the Christian Right! The result of the
distortion of these concepts is that it keeps many women from knowing why they
should even care about these terms and the rich treasure trove of ideas they
hold. I’m not trying to hold up the ’60s here as some kind of ideal that you
can never attain. Quite the opposite. I’m here to tell you about your radical
heritage because I believe you can use it to make history even better than we
did.

We
called ourselves “radicals” and “women’s liberationists” with a great deal of
pride. By radical, we did not mean extreme; we meant at the very heart of, or
at the root. We wanted to get at the heart of the matter, to understand the
root of our oppression as women, so that we would know how to fight to win, not
just fight to show off or just to be able to say we were doing something. We
wanted so much for ourselves and our sex; we weren’t about to settle for mere
“crumbs from the freedom table” as the Civil Rights Movement used to put it.

We need
to always remember that every inch of freedom that we enjoy today was fought
for and won by women united in struggle. By women, who, like ourselves, wanted
liberation above all else because it was the only way to get what we wanted and
needed—to fulfill our dreams.

Radicalism
has always been and still is crucial to that fight. There is a lot of confusion
about what is and isn’t radical. An understanding of an idea like “radical”
doesn’t come overnight or out of the blue. It doesn’t come from books so much
as from experience in freedom fights. It comes particularly from the actual
experience of radical theory, strategy and tactics, from actually jumping into
the battle ourselves.

Without
radical theory, there would be no Women’s Liberation Movement. Without radical
strategy and tactics, we have no hope of abolishing male supremacy.
History—both the history of the Women’s Liberation Movement and the history of
human progress—show that without radicals, there is no progress for women or
for the masses of people. Kathie Sarachild and others explain this well in the
Redstockings book, Feminist Revolution.

The test
of radical theory is “Is it true in the real world?” Is it a deep truth that
goes all the way to the roots, to the source, to the heart of a matter? What is
untrue cannot be considered radical. When we talk about radical feminist
theory, we mean the radical, deep truth about women’s situation. When we apply
“radical” to the Women’s Liberation Movement, we mean the radical, deep truth
about our fight for liberation.

Now
there are other truths—deep, radical truths— about other things in this world
besides women and women’s liberation. But we must be careful not to confuse
them with women and women’s liberation. For example, there are a lot of
people—women included—who try to redefine radical feminism to mean the fight
against every injustice in society, bringing them all under the feminist
umbrella and therefore making feminism meaningless. To say that economic exploitation,
poverty, racism, peace, or the environment are feminist issues is first of all
not true. They are issues that concern men as well as women and should be
solved by men and women working together. The effect of calling these other
issues feminist is that the real issues that affect us as a sex get pushed
aside. OUR issues get diluted or even lost. Women end up fighting for
everything BUT our own freedom. And it lets men off the hook because these are
issues that affect them and that they should be fighting on. If the Women’s
Liberation Movement doesn’t fight for women’s liberation, who will?

Our
stated goal is in the very name: Women’s…Liberation…Movement. The shortening of
the name to women’s movement is sometimes just sloppiness, but it is often an
attempt to redirect the thrust of radical feminism and cool it off. The goal of
a “women’s movement” can be just about anything. The goal of the Women’s
Liberation Movement is clearly the liberation of women. To fight in segregated
groups as women on these other issues—no matter how crucial they are—is a
backward, reactionary step because it makes us into a kind of ladies auxiliary
to the real struggle. When we fight on general issues, we do it as people, not
as women.

On the
other hand when we segregate ourselves into women only groups to fight male
supremacy it is because we recognize the necessity of organizing out of the
earshot of the oppressor. Like labor unions we have had to fight for the right
to meet without the bosses in the room. Some women say we need “free space”
without men to fight on these general issues. But we never shied away from
confrontations with men in the general movement. To us, fighting for equality
in movement groups was part of the struggle for women’s liberation. We formed
women’s caucuses within those groups to deal with the male supremacy that was
keeping us from full participation.

So
feminist theory—to be radical—must be true and honest and unafraid of its own
conclusions. It must reveal the position of women as we really are. It tests
all premises against what we know, what we can learn from sharing our own
experiences, not on what some man or some book or even some woman tells us is
true. In the Women’s Liberation Movement we have always relied heavily on our
own experiences and feelings to study our position in society and to develop
our theory and strategy for change. This we named CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING. We
were adamantly committed to finding truth under the mass of lies about women
and telling it as clearly as we could. A deluge of stifling rules of how to do
consciousness-raising would come later, but at first the only rule was to tell
the truth so that our analysis would be based on the truth of women’s lives.

We put
at the forefront of our struggle those forms of oppression which all women
experience and which all men benefit from so that women would understand that
even the best of men aren’t good enough and a real fundamental change in the
power relationship is what’s needed. Those issues—public childcare, men sharing
the housework, good sex, respect, abortion, restrictive clothing and beauty
standards—were not necessarily the most sensational or horrible or heart-rending
or media-grabbing. When we discussed and organized around issues which do not
directly happen to every woman and are not done by every man, such as rape or
violence against women, we presented them as part of the whole picture and not
as single issues isolated from other aspects of our oppression.

Consciousness
raising helped us cut through the tendency—which we all have to some degree—of
substituting wishful thinking for reality. It is absolutely necessary to
understand our situation if we are to change it. That is why consciousness
raising came from radical feminists. We were determined to examine our lives
from what we knew and what we could know, not look to some wishful thinking
about some golden age of matriarchy when women supposedly ruled the world.

Through
consciousness-raising, we learned early on that THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL, that
so many of what seemed to be our individual problems and frustrations were
really a social problem that was a result of the power that men had over us.
Being stuck with the housework and childrearing, lack of abortion and
childcare, unsatisfying sex, oppressive appearance codes, double standards and
lack of respect were all political problems that resulted in the usurpation of
our time, labor and mental and emotional energy. Therefore, we reasoned, each
woman standing up for herself, though often necessary, was not enough to win
freedom. We would have to unite like labor unions had done and like the Black
freedom movement was doing, to build enough power to change the society as a
whole, not just one man at a time. We needed a strong Women’s Liberation
Movement that could speak and act with the power of a class in the interest of
all women.

The
Personal Is Political is one of those concepts that got turned on its head. It
did not mean that taking action in our personal lives—like berating a man for
telling a sexist joke—is an effective substitute for working collectively in a
group to take some real power.

If the
test of radical theory is truth, the test of radical strategy and tactics is
effectiveness. Now some people think radical feminism means picking up a gun
and shooting the first male chauvinist you see. Now we don’t wish to limit our
tactics ahead of time, but it would seem obvious that this is not the way to make
a feminist revolution. After all, many of us want men to shape up, not
disappear off the face of the earth.

Others
think radical tactics means only marching in the streets. While that is
certainly a tactic effective in many situations, being in the streets is not in
and of itself radical. It depends on why we are there, and if being there is
what needs most to be done at any given moment. To be radical means to remain
flexible and to suit our actions to the concrete situation in which we find
ourselves. Sometimes the most effective thing to do may be to beat a fast
retreat and live to fight another day. Sometimes the most militant and radical
thing a person can do is to simply tell it like it is. We need to learn and use
old proven tactics as well as create new ones. We’ve got to dare to try things,
but not in an individualistic way and not without thinking things through and
understanding what we are doing.

We
believed and tried to put into practice the slogan, SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL, a
phrase coined by Kathie Sarachild in 1968 at New York Radical Women’s very
first action [at theJeanette
Rankin Brigade in Washington, D.C. in January of 1968]. We recognized that the
unity of women was necessary for a successful political movement. Some of our
groups had rules that you didn’t flirt with or mess with another sister’s man.
We didn’t shy away from demanding power for women. We didn’t fall back on
demanding the wimpy “empowerment” of individual women that we so often see on
posters and book titles. Empowerment implies that an attitude change is enough
rather than actually getting power into women’s hands. Sisterhood Is Powerful
did not mean uncritical, individual support for anything a woman did, as it
came to mean later. We were talking about political power, societal power—the
unity to take power to determine what happened in and to our lives.

We
recognized the necessity of RAISING OURSELVES BY RAISING UP ALL WOMEN. We
couldn’t raise up our sex only by raising ourselves, because as long as any
woman could be treated like a “dumb broad” all woman could be. We were women’s
liberationists, not liberated women. We did not see ourselves as—or aspire to
be—superwomen, but to create conditions where no woman had to be superwoman to
have what she needed, to have respect, to have both a family and contribute in
the public labor force outside the home.

WE
CALLED THINGS BY THEIR NAMES. Betty Friedan wrote about “the problem that has
no name” and we named it: male supremacy. We said men oppress women, white
people oppress black people, bosses oppress workers, the rich oppress the poor,
for the real material advantages that they get out of it, not because we were
brainwashed or socialized by some vague entity called “society.” We didn’t talk
about “perceived” sexism, racism, exploitation, as if maybe they didn’t exist
or couldn’t really be known. We didn’t demand just “choice,” but “Free Abortion
on Demand.” We said the words that we actually meant and that helped us
organize. It didn’t turn women off; they responded in droves, like after the
Miss America Pageant Protest when Ros Baxandall, one of the members of New York
Radical Women, appeared on the David Susskind show and said “Every day in a
woman’s life is a walking Miss America Pageant” and we received more letters than
we could even answer. Women responded to a group calling itself New York
Radical Women and wrote, “I’ve been waiting all my life for something like
this.”

The
Women’s Liberation Movement was initially rather successful at exposing the
myth that our problems as women were “all in our head.” We showed they came
from the male supremacist society in which we live. Telling the truth about
sex, love, men, work, in consciousness-raising groups and then analyzing our
experiences led us to discover that real circumstances were usually at the
root, not some psychological hangup. We did certain things not because we were
brainwashed or conditioned, but because there are real punishments for daring
to go against the rules—written or unwritten. If women wore make-up, it wasn’t
just because we were brainwashed by advertising, but because we were forced to
deal with constant pressure from men and bosses to look a certain way. We
called this understanding of why women act the way we do THE PRO-WOMAN LINE. As
I wrote in “The Personal Is Political” in 1969:

What
[the pro-woman line] says basically is that women are really neat people. The
bad things that are said about us as women are either myths (women are stupid),
tactics women use to struggle individually (women are bitches), or are actually
things that we want to carry into the new society and want men to share too
(women are sensitive, emotional). Women as oppressed people act out of
necessity (act dumb in the presence of men), not out of choice. Women have
developed great shuffling techniques for their own survival (look pretty and
giggle to get or keep a job or man) which should be used when necessary until
such time as the power of unity can take its place. Women are smart not to
struggle alone (as are blacks and workers). It is no worse to be in the home
than in the rat race of the job world. They are both bad. Women, like blacks,
workers, must stop blaming ourselves for our “failures.”

The Pro-Woman
Line would later get skewed to support the reactionary idea that women are
inherently superior to men. During the century-long struggle for the women’s
right to vote in the United States, many feminists claimed women would use
their vote to bring morality, peace and harmony to the world. It hasn’t
happened. Women must claim their right to participate in the affairs of the
world based on justice, not purity. Otherwise we end up in a new prison of our
own making. Women are quite capable of arrogance, cruelty, murder, child abuse,
cheating and cheating on, robbery and soldiering. Men are capable of love,
caring, honesty, humility, fidelity, fairness and the desire for peace. The
vexing question is how do we create a society in which the positive in all
human potential is brought to the fore.

As
radicals, WE COMMITTED OURSELVES TO CHANGING THE WORLD in a way that gave
people hope and drew them to join us. People risked or gave up jobs, careers,
lovers, homes, family ties, life savings, their sanity, their security, and in
some cases their lives, for something bigger and more important that each of us
as individuals.

WE
WORKED HARD. While many of us didn’t think male supremacy—and capitalism and
racism—would be as intransigent as they have proven to be, we were aware that
it would take an enormous amount of hard work and sacrifice to better our
lives. We encouraged and pushed each other to do the kind of hard ground work
that made us effective. I can’t in all honesty say there was no competition in
the movement, but as a rule, we delighted in each other’s work. When somebody
would write a paper or come up with a new idea or take some daring action, we
would be thrilled and inspired.

We put our FAITH IN “THE PEOPLE.” We
believed that we could unite into a force strong enough to cut through all the
lies and fear to either educate or force people to abandon their prejudices and
hatreds and privileges. I have to admit that this is one of the ideas I find it
hardest to hang on to. The racism, sexism, class arrogance and power that
permeates our society now sometimes seems un–overcome–able. But then I hear of
some freedom fight going on, or I read an enlightening analysis of some
struggle, or the enemy exposes his weakness and stupidity and shows he’s not
invincible, and I’m ready to get back into the fray. Sometimes I just need to
feel the outrage and anger of people speaking up against injustice and I think,
“Right on, let’s go.”

These
are only some, and mostly very general, things that I believe we did right and
that we must build upon if we are going to make another great leap forward, or
even a big step. Our mistakes were many and we also need to come to understand
them so as not to repeat them.

But to
do either in any meaningful way, we must make history again. I know each time I
dare to do something, I learn something important. Sometimes it can be
frustrating or painful or confusing, but each step—even if it is small or if it
is not the success we hoped it would be—teaches us something. I remember how
hard it was to get up and hang the women’s liberation banner inside the convention
hall at the Miss America Protest. Doing this meant disrupting the big moment of
the outgoing Miss America as she began her farewell speech. It seemed so rude
and such a terrible thing to do to this woman. And I remember thinking, “Do we
really have to do this?” But as we stood there shouting “Freedom for Women—No
More Miss America—Women’s Liberation” a great wonderful liberating feeling came
over me. There is an old slogan from the 60s—DARE TO STRUGGLE; DARE TO WIN. We
will never win unless we dare to struggle. That’s a fact of life. You can’t
move forward when you’re sitting on your butt.

I think
one of the most important things the Women’s Liberation Movement can do right
now is to organize into effective organizations. We’ve had too much “do your
own thingism.” Not everything a woman does in the name of feminism is good, and
not everything a feminist group does is good. Some strategies are more
effective than others, and some even set us back. In the beginning of our
movement, we were very good at raising consciousness, but we neglected to build
ongoing organizations with accountable, chosen leadership. We must get even
more serious about our work, really dig in our heels and do our homework. The
task of making a feminist revolution is going to be harder than any of us
imagined when we started the Women’s Liberation Movement nearly 30 years ago.
We are going to have to be better organized than our oppressors, more
determined, more persistent, but we have decades of recent history to study and
centuries of feminist struggle to guide us.

THE
REACTIONARY RIGHT

I want to say a few words
about the reactionary right—which is a redundancy in terms, I guess—before we
go to question and answers. Some say “The right is just so strong these days,
fascism is just around the corner and it’s gonna get us if we don’t put all our
efforts into stopping them.” There’s some truth in that, but the real question
is, “What’s the best way to do it?”

First of
all, I want to assure you that the Right has always been around and ever bit as
much in control as they are now. Hey, I grew up in the 1950s when “family
values” were so in control that I didn’t know what an abortion was. I knew if I
got pregnant in high school, I would have a shotgun marriage or I would be sent
away to have the baby and give it up for adoption. And you think the Right is
strong today?

What
deposed the Right of the 1950s? The movement of the 1960s. Not with slogans and
rallies to “Stop the Right” but with organizations dedicated to freedom and equality—social,
economic and political. Dedicated to putting power into the hands of the
people—the people who actually do the work—the production and the
reproduction—rather than leaving it in the hands of parasites who live off
everybody else. I hear young people moan that they grew up under Reagan and
Bush. Well, we grew up under McCarthy and General Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
We had the media telling us where our place was then, too—and that was in the
home, period. The TV commercials were selling us Toni home permanents and floor
wax, and a real woman knew how to use them and went into ecstasy at the sight
of a bright and shiny floor because she dare not demand some ecstasy in the
bedroom.

The
Right is not strong because they are correct. They are not strong because their
ideology is appealing to the vast majority. They are strong because we are
weak. We’re not winning very much right now. If fact, we’re being pushed
backward. But that’s because we are disorganized and have little unity. We
don’t even have national publications that carry the news of people’s struggles
and teach us how to do our work better.

I had a
little discussion group at my house one night after watching the documentary
about the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement called “Freedom on My Mind.” The
one thing I learned that night was that when it comes to the general movement
against capitalist oppression, hardly anybody knows what it is that they want
anymore. We don’t even have a ideology to unite around. How can you win if you
don’t know what you’re fighting for? People who once considered themselves
socialists look at what’s happening in the former socialist countries and say
“Socialism has failed. I guess I can’t be a socialist anymore because socialism
doesn’t work.” Instead of looking at what went wrong with the practice—with
trying to put the principles of socialism into practice—they say it’s a
failure. But as Kwame Ture, who I knew as Stokely Carmichael, pointed out in a
speech here recently, the principles are still sound, even if they haven’t yet
been correctly put into practice. Women’s liberation has not been put into
practice yet either. It hasn’t won yet, but do we abandon the great principle
of what we have been fighting for because we haven’t won yet?

Before
the fall of the Soviet Union and similar setbacks for socialism around the
world, to be a Red meant that the government and the powers that be considered
you a dangerous subversive; now it means that you are just a relic of the past
pushing an outdated and ineffective ideology. That’s a real smart thing to pull
on Americans, because some of us can stand up—at least some of the time—to
being considered a dangerous subversive, but, boy, it’s just as hard or even
harder to be dismissed as irrelevant, obsolete fools.

At a
time when the big corporations are making a great leap forward in
internationalizing their workforce and their markets—that is, going after the
markets, cheap labor and other natural resources around the world that they
have no right to—it seems to me that most of what such male radicals as Marx,
Lenin and Mao wrote about is turning out to be true. Check it out. Don’t listen
to somebody else’s interpretation of what these great revolutionaries said.
Read them for yourselves. Many of us in women’s liberation learned a lot from
these theorists and from the revolutions that they led. The first paper I wrote
for the Women’s Liberation Movement in Notes
from the First Year was called “Women of the World Unite—We Have
Nothing to Lose But Our Men,” a take-off on the unity called for in the
Communist Manifesto: “Workingmen of all counties unite, you have nothing to
lose but your chains.” Those words had made the hair on the back of my neck
stand up when I read them in a college class because I immediately thought of
how hard my parents who were small farmers had to work for so little. The class
was called “Democracy and Its Enemies,” but I just knew those words had not
been written by my enemy! They raised in my mind the idea that things do not
have to be the way they are. We could get together and make it better. Of
course, if Marx were here today, we would have to raise his consciousness to
change that phrase to “working people of all countries” instead of “working
men”!

Consciousness
raising itself came directly from our experience in the southern Civil Rights
Movement—and from reading Mao and a book called Fanshen by William Hinton about the Chinese Revolution. I have to tell you these things
because they are the truth and part of our history, even if they might scare
you a little because all you know about them is probably what you’ve been told
by a power structure that wants to keep you away from this theory by scaring
you off with the big C-word: communism.

As
capitalists become more organized inter-nationally, it is obvious that “Working
people of all countries unite, you have nothing to loose but your chains” is
more relevant today than it ever was. National boundaries mean less and less.
Being a middle-class American is no longer an assurance of living a comfortable
life. Uniting and organizing against this great international power becomes a
necessity. And you as future professionals, are going to have to decide which
side are you on—which side you are going to give your time and your talents to.
The way things are going you may end up working a $6 an hour job anyway—with or
without that college degree.

To
believe that there is anything near a level playing field in the United States
is like depending on a mirage of water in a desert. And yet, many people seen
to prefer to think the mirage is real than to deal with the reality that it is
not. We like to think that anyone who is “smart” and/or works hard enough can
climb right up the ladder, or at least make a good living. The possibility that
a person can move into the class above him or her through initiative and hard
work is probably just a little greater than winning the lottery. As Mississippi
civil rights workers liked to point out in the 1960s, “If hard work made you
rich, Black people would own America.” (Not to mention women!)

We are
living in a time of great opportunity to take a great leap forward for
humankind. Consciousness about ourselves as working people is rising because of
what is happening to our lives. Inherited wealth and power are as much the
order of the day as inherited kingdoms and fiefdoms were in the days of
feudalism. There is nothing representative or democratic in our “representative
democracy” in which a bunch of lawyers and businessmen inside the beltway run
the country at the behest of the corporate fronts of America’s wealthy
families. The contradictions of capitalism, of male supremacy, of racism—both
in this country and in the world—are getting so sharp that you have to really
shut your eyes tight and sing your mantra loud not to see and hear it. What we
are lacking is a clear goal and effective organization—a program with a
strategy. Something to unite around with at least a general idea of how to
proceed. We must get to work on this.

The
corporate grip on America is so tight, most people accept the fact that the
head honchos make 157 times more than the people who produce the goods, even
when these CEOs have obviously done the kind of job a mere worker would be
fired for. The few big guys who do get fired are rewarded with severance
packages that will keep them living very comfortably for life.

How is
it that these overpaid corporate executives get to decide to move or close down
plants, layoff workers, or turn half the workforce into blue, white or pink
collar migrants? Where is democracy when it comes to the workplace where we
spend such a large part of our lives and which dictates so much of the rest of
what we do?

While
not everyone works for a large corporation, it is these large businesses that
call the tune for the remainder of the country. Such progressive benefits as
the 40-hour week, sick leave and vacation benefits, were won when workers were
able to change the law and/or the employee policies of large companies, largely
through the pressure of strikes and popular support. Unorganized workers and
those working in small shops have always benefited from union successes. These
advances won by labor struggles are being rolled back and we are in danger of
loosing them, just as the hard-won, and limited right to abortion is being
eroded.

Insecurity
and poverty are no longer limited to women, people of color, and blue and pink
collar workers. We, the working people, must move beyond joining petty “tax
revolt” organizations and trying to put the brakes on government aid to the
poor and unemployed as the means of solving our financial crisis. We must take
a good look at where our money and jobs are really going and who is making the
decisions. It’s not you and me—and it should be. We need to restructure our
whole system to get some democracy where it really counts.

By
taking up this struggle, men can do more for women’s liberation than by trying
to work in the Women’s Liberation Movement. We want your support when we ask
for it and we expect you to give it. But your primary battle must be against
capitalism and for socialism. Get yourself down on the picket line at Publix
where brave workers are leading a struggle against racial and sexual
discrimination and harassment. These workers are fighting for you and me as
well as for themselves. White men have to realize that black people and women
are like the canaries used in the coal mine to warn the miners of what’s coming
their way. If the struggle at Publix is lost, it will weaken ALL workers.

I’d be
lying to you if I stood up here and pretended to have all the answers. I don’t.
But I do have some ideas about what we must do based on my participation in the
struggle. Everything we know in the movement comes from struggle—somebody’s struggle. Some
people will say, “Oh, I read all about women winning the vote in a book.” Well,
he or she may have read the book, but if some people hadn’t jumped in and made
the struggle, they wouldn’t have the book to read. And if the book is really
good and tells deep truths, you can bet somebody went through some kind of
struggle to get it written and published and into your hands.

So get
involved. Do it for yourself to better your own life and do it for humanity.
The best way to do that is to join an organization. That’s pretty easy to do
here in Gainesville. As far as I know, there are few places in the country that
have both the rich radical tradition of struggle and active radical feminists
willing and eager to teach you your history and how to organize. Gainesville is
one of those rare places. If you’re a student you can join UF/SFCC Campus NOW.
If you’re not a student, you can join Gainesville Area NOW. When we’re finished
here, you can go over to the Gainesville Women’s Liberation table and learn
more about the ideas I’ve talked about because I’ve not had time to explain
them thoroughly. Go buy a copy of Feminist
Revolution, the Redstockings book which I helped edit. Learn about
our history so you can make history. Then go out and make some history so that
you can better understand history. Inform yourself. Go over the Civic Media
Center at 1021 West University Avenue. They have a unique and wonderful
collection of material including video and audio tapes from, by and about all
kinds of movements. I wish I could spend a couple of months in there myself.
I’d know a whole lot more than I do now. If you’re eligible to join a union, do
it. If you’re already in a union, get active. Or join other organizations
working for economic and social justice. If you’re a student, join the Freedom
Coalition. It will help you fight tuition hikes and other student issues.

I know
from experience that not everyone is going to join a women’s liberation group
or a NOW group. Some of you aren’t going to want to get involved. But you can
at least give some money to the organizations that are out their fighting to
make your life better. Forego a few goodies for yourself and pass that money on
to feminist work. If every woman in the country would donate one percent of her
income, we could win a lot very quickly because we would have enough money to
pay organizers. Most of us working for women’s liberation end up struggling to
make a living and still do political work. That wasn’t so bad in the 1960s and
early 1970s when we could survive on a part-time job and still do a lot of
organizing. But that’s not possible in today’s economy. I often find that I
don’t have the time to do the research to make my work better. It takes a lot
of time sometimes to search out your hunches or to present your case clearly.
You end up flying by the seat of your pants because economically there’s no
other solution.

If
you’re a little scared about getting involved, it’s ok. But don’t let that fear
stop you. One of the things that I learned in the Civil Rights Movement is that
everyone gets scared sometimes. You’re only a coward if you let that fear stop
you from what needs to be done. The struggle isn’t always easy and sometimes it
will call on you to make sacrifices you’d rather not make. But don’t let that
stop you either. Several years ago I was feeling very depressed about all the
setbacks we were experiencing. It looked like we might to lose abortion rights
and everything else I’d spent my life fighting for. Then one day it dawned on
me how much worse my life would have been without the gains the movement had
made. I’d still be in agony walking around in a girdle, skirts and high heels!
I’d still be worrying constantly about my relationships with men and not know
what to do about them. I would be blaming myself for everything that’s wrong with
my life. And I would have been a lot dumber about the world and how it
operates. My life would have been less rich, less interesting. I would not have
the satisfaction of knowing that it has counted for something—that I am part of
the great ongoing struggle to free women and humanity from the oppressions that
keeps us all from realizing our best dreams. I want that experience for you,
too.

I urge
you not only to study our liberation movement’s history but to donate your
time, energy and money to organizations fighting for justice.

Fight
on, Sisters!

This speech was the keynote
address at the University of Florida (Gainesville) Women’s History Month
activities on March 27, 1996. It appeared in Frankly Feminist, A Collection of
Writings from the Hudson Valley Woman 1991-1995 by Carol Hanisch.